For one of the last JD-OD shoots of 2013, Den caught up with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams to learn about how Plex’s SaaS software has enabled them to achieve a result without a formal IT department. As Charlie Bauer, Director of Operations of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream explains, Jeni’s is no stranger to cloud systems. They use cloud for eCommerce and live customer chat and Google Apps for business.

But until their use of Plex, they had never used cloud for ERP and manufacturing. Now live on Plex, Bauer tells Den what that means for Jeni’s business:

We use it for product planning, production planning. We use it on the shop floor to keep track of everything we make and where it goes, if we send it to a warehouse in Columbus or Nashville. Or we send it to Chicago, where we ship it to customers around the country. All the accounting systems, as well, are all on Plex.

With their Plex system in place, Jeni’s has plans to triple their ice cream output in 2014. The hardware investment needed to make it all happen? Some new scanning guns, and that’s about it. Bauer makes the case for cloud in very simple terms:

You have to understand your own capabilities and house. Ours are very limited. We are not an IT shop; we’d rather spend our money on making the world’s best ice cream and putting that into ingredients.

Jon was on hand in Boston for Progress Exchange 2013 to get a first hand look at Progress Software’s PaaS transitions. He also shot a couple of videos that make the cut for our JD-OD best of year in review.

First up? His interview with Karen Tegan Padir. Progress CTO. Tegan Padir tells Jon about how they consulted heavily with their partners and customers prior to rolling out Pacific, their PaaS platform. She also makes the case for the business AND technical value of PaaS:

The beauty of platform as a service is you don’t have to worry about the assembly of the whole stack. Our customers have had that luxury with OpenEdge from the beginning. The embedded database, the runtime, the development tooling has all been together in OpenEdge. It’s the same in a PaaS. You don’t have to go and hire system administrators to set up the hardware infrastructure and cloud infrastructure; you don’t have to hire a database administrator to set up the database. You go to the PaaS and all of the runtime, embedded database is all there for you and you just worry about creating your application.

Startups get to spend money on people that are domain experts for the business they’re in and the application they want to build – versus the infrastructure of configuring a database and setting up systems.

Jon also spoke with a long time Progress partner, CARDWATCH, about their experiences on the Progress platform:

According to Gary McMullen, President of CARDWATCH, spend management with their institutional clients is still undergoing a massive shift from the inefficiences of pen and paper to smarter systems. CARDWATCH’s spend management systems are built Progress’ business rules capabilities to drive transactions. McMullen:

Now we are introducing this technology, we are enforcing some specific rules within their organization. We try and take the servers or the cashiers out of that decision loop. We’re enforcing rules like:

Is that item on the menu today?

Is it taxable?

Is it eligible on the meal plan?

What price level does the resident receive when that item is purchased?

The benefits of CARDWATCH’S spend management systems extend beyond operational efficiency and into safety and security. As McMullen tells Jon:

The management and security department can look and see whether Mrs. Smith has had a meal today and if she hasn’t, they make a phone call to make sure she’s okay. That’s a huge component.

While at Dreamforce 2013, Den filmed shoots with two FinancialForce customers that make the cut for our ‘best of 2013′ JD-OD review.

In the feature shoot, Den talks with MobileCare2U, about how they are addressing complex billing with FinancialForce. MobileCare2U provides dental care to nursing homes in 5 states and 400 homes, so assistance with billing for their professional services was imperative. In short: they needed to take their billing in-house.

John Rosenbaum, CFO of MobileCare2U explained to Den how their business requirements led them to FinancialForce:

We had a unique requirement that would be able to take nursing homes and look at all the residents at that home, and send the nursing home a statement that included all the residents that resided at that home. We also had other residents at the same nursing home where we needed to send the statement to their responsible party. We had different account types and parent-child relationships – that was our unique need that forced the table to turn.

What does the new solution look like to users? Pretty simple. Basically all they do is check a box and send off the bill to the nursing homes.

Next up? Den spoke with Chambers Gasket about how they solved downtime issues with FinancialForce:

Chambers Gasket faced some tough business realities when their power lines were stolen and they couldn’t answer customer queries for 5 days. Den asked Chris Kenny, who runs finance for Chambers Gasket, how FinancialForce enabled their organization to become less vulnerable to critical outages, and how using an external cloud server makes Chambers Gasket feel more secure, not less – about their business data.

Kenny has also found another key benefit in better operational reporting. This was accomplished by moving their reporting to Salesforce/FinancialForce from Crystal Reports. Kenny’s view of the end result:

The real beauty of what we have now is we have one database for everything from the customer’s name to all the production work order data. We can type in a customer’s name and bring up every data element we want from one reporting engine.

At SAP TechEd 2012, the JD-OD shot a slew of videos, including SAP customer talks on mobility, analytics, and HANA. Here’s a review of several we haven’t yet featured on JD-OD.com.

Den talked with Tammy Powlas about her work at Fairfax Water – in particular the predicaments of education and why continuing education is crucial to SAP project success. As Den put it in his diginomica post about this interview, Educate or die: a view from Fairfax Water:

In this video, Ms Powlas makes the case for continuing education. She implies there really is no excuse for not keeping yourself well informed, even if you already have a day job. Like others in the Mentor program, Ms Powlas is dedicated to the notion of community but it is not altruistic in the sense most might think. She makes it very plain that maintaining skills is one of the keys to ensuring project success and ensuring that her projects help the business maintain a low cost profile.

According to Kalyan, one of the biggest things they’ve learned as a company is that “mobility isn’t just about apps. It’s about the people. It’s about the fact that people feel that we are mobile.” But mobility isn’t just a feel-good story for Varian – they’ve been able to achieve significant ROI in some cases. Kalyan cites a field service application as one example:

We built a tracking app for our field service engineers. Earlier a field service engineer had to call our support techs and hold on the line for 15 minutes, and then the support tech had to look them up in the system and address their concerns. That’s 30 minutes per call and we have 897 field service technicians. Can you imagine the calls in a whole year?

Kalyan’s team found the ability to reduce those times with a field service support app, with the potential a half million dollars in one year from just one app. As he says, ‘You can imagine how we’re able to obtain a written investment for mobility.’

Jon also talked with two SAP HANA customers that were live in production: EMC and SYNOPSYS. For the EMC shoot, Jon talked with Mike Harding, IT SAP HANA Architect at EMC:

Harding had some informative views on upskilling for successful HANA projects. As he put it:

EMC has been an Oracle customer for a long time. I had a lot of really good Oracle developers who had then been retrained on ABAP and were awfully anxious to start doing SQL scripting again. We were able to leverage those skills and to really take advantage of injecting your HANA models with SQL scripts. It took us a while to figure out how we should be best managing that space, but that’s been a key benefit for us. It’s something I would highly recommend other customers do when they start to look at their HANA roadmap and journey.

Another highlight was Hasmukh Ranjan, VP of IT for semi-conductor chip designer Synosys. Ranjan’s team has advanced along their HANA path far enough to share a well-thought view of ROI on their HANA investment:

Ranjan boils the HANA ROI measurement down to these areas:

1. Practical/measurable – reducing reporting times, real-time results (the easiest metric)
2. User experience – do users see the benefit? (not as easy to measure but can be done via surveys, etc)
3. Transformative – how can the speed of reporting and ease of predictive capabilities lead tn new business use cases and market growth (this is the toughest of the three, and the one that Synopsys is still working through and discovering).

As Ranjan explains, the journey towards transforming your business with HANA is a process. But the practical phases of ROI measurement can help to make sure the journey is on track financially.

In a relatively quiet announcement, SAP recently announced free BW on HANA trials on the Amazon cloud. Is this an incremental step, or an underrated advance for SAP in its quest for openness, ease of use and developer engagement?

Who better to ask than Vijay Vijayasankar, a driving force behind the BW on HANA trials? In a two part virtual video series, Dennis got the inside story from Vijay on how the offering came about and how its success might be measured.

Vijay says that Vishal Sikka, executive board member SAP recently shared a vision where access to enterprise technology should take cues and inspiration from Apple’s App Store. That is a huge ambition, given the size and complexity of enterprise applications. As Vijay notes, gaining access to a HANA system is not trivial either in time or cost. The ability to provision and become productive on a HANA system inside 30 minutes is a dramatic change. Early results suggest it is a popular approach.

Vijay also explains some of the brass tacks of the offering, including the decision to offer BI 4.0 front end tools, as well as sample data and training content. The guys also talk about the relevance of the trial for both customers and aspiring developers.

As Vijay explains, it was during talks with customers that SAP realized they could remove significant barriers with a cloud BW trial:

One of those big things is that it takes a little bit of time to get hardware, load all the software, get a consultant to do your prototyping, and so on. As a percentage of the whole effort, the actual data modeling and reporting seemed to be the smaller chunk out of the total effort. This is kind of backwards. This is not very innovative if we let customers do proof of concepts this way. We wanted to flip it around and one of the easiest ways to do that in these days is to have a cloud deployment.

Show Notes for Part One: Will They Come?

:59 BW on HANA cloud trial – the backstory

1:55 Reducing the friction – by moving BW to the cloud for trials

2:43 The impact of customer feedback – adding the BI 4.0 instance

4:21 Inspiration for BW on HANA trials traces back to Vishal Sikka’s vision

4:49 “This happened in close collaboration with Walldorf”

5:28 – Evaluating initial traffic hits and marketplace visits

In part two of the video, the guys talk about how the BW on HANA trial can fit into current business use cases, such as financial users in need of real-time data analysis:

Show Notes for Part Two: What’s Next?

:58 BW on HANA use cases: financa and controlling example

2:12 Another example: analyzing bad debt in real-time and take action

3:33 HANA engagement driven by community interest

4:01 Vishal’s vision of modernizing applications not just by speed, but with simplicity

4:50 “We should have no reason to stick to status quo

Perhaps the most memorable quote comes from Vijay’s response to Den’s ‘This is not your mother’s SAP” comment:

I’m still relatively new to SAP, so the whole idea of “your mother’s SAP,” probably doesn’t apply as much in my case, given I still have a fair amount of external perspective. I haven’t been SAP‑washed quite yet. But one thing I can definitely say is that Vishal’s vision of modernizing applications not just by spearing it up, but also making it very, very simple for users. When I started this project, what he wanted me to do is try to find a way to do it in three days. That would have been a lot better than the three months it takes to do a POC now. We ended up doing it in a 30‑minute fashion.

Finance is changing dramatically to include more business-oriented strategies and less bean counting. At Workday Rising, Dennis hashed these issues out with Workday’s Mark Nittler.

Mark has a background in accounting himself, but as he explains, finance is much more interesting now that it’s not all about number-crunching.

The guys delve into the changing relationship between HR and finance. As Mark sees it, one of the reasons the relationship has shifted is because HR is shifting from a cost center to a talent center.

Mark talks about some of the main areas of finance that are being affected, including planning and analytics. Dennis then poses a critical question: how, as an HR manager, do you deal with financial pressure? Do you cut staff or decrease wages? Mark outlines tactics managers can use instead of the dreaded across-the-board pay cut, including sourcing work outside the organization and reducing non-essential activities.

The guys wrap by discussing the mindset change finance professionals need to make. Mark points out there’s more people making decisions at lower levels of the organization that need the info that finance has – and ‘that’s where it’s starting to become interesting.’ Mark sums it up by noting there’s a ‘bright future ahead of us’ for finance.

At Workday Rising, Dennis caught up with Michael Bause, VP Technology with Equifax, about their recent Workday implementation.

It’s a story we’re hearing a lot these days: replacing legacy technologies, improving business processes, turning HCM into a competitive advantage. Or if not an advantage, at least a far better user experience.

As Michael explains to Dennis, the goal of the new HCM project was not simply about modernizing payroll applications:

We needed to get our HR partners out of the business of pushing paper around and actually helping our leaders to get that seat at the table, what everybody wants in making decisions. We wanted a platform that could actually help us achieve that in a relatively quick time.

Michael talks Dennis through the Workday selection and implementation phases, and then shares the results. One result not to be underestimated: better user engagement. Users who actually enjoying their HR applications? Yes, Michael says it’s possible:

A lot of times in the past, we’ve pushed things out from corporate and just made those things happen. We’ve actually got a product now that we can say that we globally deployed and people are now enjoying it. It’s not a chore to go into HR necessarily and do HR things.

The conversation wraps with lessons learned about process standardization and simplification globally.

Show Notes

:41 “We needed to make a change”

1:31 The selection process – due diligence

2:25 Project results

3:13 People are actually enjoying HR

3:42 Advice – focus on business process, and “don’t be scared of the technology”

It was my first time at VM World and a very different affair to the business applications events I usually attend. VM World is a geek’s paradise with hardware stacked to the show floor rafters and not a salesperson’s ‘suit’ in sight. Some playfully described it as a ‘cult’ in the nicest possible terms. They see VM Ware as a company that attracts and retains devoted fans. I could not help but notice the lines for the education sessions. Wait lists for lectures? You go it.

Den sat down with VWworld executive Sanjay Poonen to hash out the conference takeaways. Sanjay explains, VMware is headlong into a new business direction, moving from virtualization to cloud computing. Ergo, the VMworld announcement of the vCloud Hybrid Service.

The guys then dig into the impact of mobility. Den’s take?

Sanjay argues that in a world where employees are increasingly being encouraged to bring their own device, methods need to be found where the employee can genuinely separate private and business usage. If VM Ware can do this in a drop dead easy manner where the end user has clearly understood options then they may be on a winner, given the company’s existing brand strength.

Show Notes

:50 Sanjay is settling in at VMware

1:43 The business message? Create automation, agility and to lower costs

Analyst shoot: Dennis also got a VMworld take from Holger Mu of Constellation Research:

Here’s how Dennis framed his conversation with Holger:

With VMware wanting to instrument ‘cloud’ (however defined) management through a suite of compute, storage and networking on the one side and business still confused about ‘cloud,’ just how will VMware articulate a message that resonates back to the business? In the above video, I tackled this topic with Holger Muelller, analyst at Constellation Research. He agrees this represents a significant challenge. He also questions whether VM Ware buyers are even thinking about the public cloud.

Holger Mueller Show Notes

1:53 VMware’s challenge: communicating with a business audience3:47 VMware’s customer base has questions about public cloud4:50 What VMware needs to do next6:20 VMware’s success hurt hardware companies the most

In Jon’s Acumatica partner event wrap for diginomica, he hit on a big topic for any cloud ERP firm with midmarket aspirations – rolling out vertical functionality. At the show, Jon caught up with JAAS Systems, one of Acumatica’s most established ISVs. JAAS has built out a manufacturing component that is fully integrated with Acumatica’s ERP solution – meaning it has the same look and feel as the core Acumatica product.

JAAS Systems’ John Schlemmer and Fred Szumlic told me their story and also chimed in on the question of adoption for manufacturing in the cloud. In 2010, JAAS could see the writing on the enterprise wall: it was time to modernize their product.

The end result? Choosing Acumatica as their cloud ERP partner. During the video, Schlemmer and Szumlic talk about the work entailed moving their product from client-server to Acumatica’s web-based browser.

They also shared a major reason for selecting Acumatica: the ability to offer both cloud and on-premise versions of the software, giving their customers’ deployment choices and giving JAAS some protection as cloud manufacturing adoption increases.

Szumlic emphasized cloud is more than a deployment option:

To us, cloud technology is more than just where [the software] resides. Cloud technology affords mobility. It affords access to data files and information from anywhere in the world back to your company, be it the shop floor or at a conference or convention.

It also has some excellent price performance advantages that obviously a manufacturer’s always looking for…Cloud technology is still something that I think manufacturers will evolve to because of the advantages it gives them to maintain a competitive advantage.

As for those services firms that are lagging behind in their cloud transitions, Szumlic closed with some words of advice: productize your industry knowledge into vertical solutions.

If you truly verticalize, you really have to stay on it. There are times when you want to get off, or you want to deviate because business pressures or the economy are moving something. But once you decide ‘This is where I’m going,’ if you build that knowledge base and you build that level of expertise, it pays off, as we’ve seen that with our Acumatica transition.

Show Notes

:45 Founding of JAAS systems in 1999

1:17: Moving from client-server to web-based Acumatica browser

2:25 Cloud versus on-premise manufacturing

4:21 Why vertical solutions matter.

5:54 Acumatica customer stories

7:38 How to measure a successful go-live

8:43 Advice on developing verticals

Disclosure: Acumatica paid for Jon’s travel and accommodations to the Acumatica Partner Summit.

Acumatica has a different approach to cloud ERP that is worth a listen. CEO Yury Larichev sat down with Jon during the Acumatica Partner Summit to give his take on Acumatica’s market opportunity.

First up? Discussion of Acumatica’s license model, which is based on total consumption not tied to number of seats. Acumatica says this approach helps customers to easily open up system access to casual users and external customers via Acumatica’s portal. Yury explains:

We don’t charge per user. We don’t limit customers. We don’t penalize customers for accidental users they have…Through the portals, you can extend your ERP and CRM functionality to your channel or your suppliers, your partners or your customers and your consultants as well, which will be working somewhere in the field. They can access AP, AR, customer records, CRM and opportunities.

The guys move on to discuss Acumatica’s approach to industry verticals and Yury makes it clear why partners are so important to Acumatica’s vertical build-out, with 20 add-on solutions live, and 60 IT partners and counting. Yury also clarifies that Acumatica does support multi-tenancy as of version 4.1 announced at the conference – a point not all attendees were clear about as of day 2.

The final point of discussion? Mobility. Acumatica’s mobile platform is still in the works, though Yury points out that Acumatica is already browser-accessible, which has provided them with some time to evaluate what kinds of mobile applications their users need beyond the core functionality they can access via browsers:

We have positioned Acumatica as a platform and obviously as a cloud solution. It works in any browser today. It automatically adjusts to your screen size, regardless of where you use it, on your cell phone, smartphone or your iPad. We’ve been thinking about the usage scenarios, talking about mobile applications. I doubt, if we simply replicate their CRM or IP functionality on a mobile, that customers will use it. It’s too complex.I think it is scenario by scenario, with several business functions in any single application.

Acumatica’s solution? Yury tells Jon the plan – to build out a platform which will allow for ease of deployment on iOS, Android, and Windows phone. The current timeline? To include it in the next major release, 5.0, scheduled for release end of Q1, 2014.

Show Notes

:33 A different license model

1:52 Extending functionality to customers and suppliers

3:11 Acumatica’s vertical opportunity Now you have a chance to provide a different kind of customer experience, working here. What can you tell us about a customer example or two of using your product?

4:50 Partners play a big role in verticals – 60 IT partners, 20 live solutions

On the last day of the Acumatica Summit (for the assembled media), Jon corralled Brian Sommer for the Acumatica Summit wrap.

Brian shares his instant reactions to what he saw at the Summit, which included “pleasant surprise.”.Acumatica’s unique partner-centric go-to-market is the next topic on deck. Then the guys move into a discussion of multi-tenancy, one issue that partners were looking for more information on during the show (Multi-tenancy is supported in the new version of Acumatica announced at the conference – version 4.1).

It does matter. It matters because one of the single biggest expense items for companies, one of the most painful headaches is to actually maintain, upgrade, and keep current their application software. In a multi-tenant world, a vendor is supposed to do all that maintenance for you. Not the reseller, not the customer, but the vendor. That’s because there should only be one copy of the code. There’s one instance of it and just like Google’s search engine tool where we all get to see the new stuff, that’s what you’re supposed to see.

The guys close the video with another critical topic: industry verticals and how Acumatica plans to team with partners on needed vertical functionality. Brian explains why verticals drive the midmarket ERP sales process:

Partners will have the lowest friction in selling when they create case studies of vertical solutions. They have customer references, have their own subject matter experts who know a particular vertical very well and they promote the daylights out of it. It’ll just make their partners so much more successful that they sell that as opposed to a generic financial accounting system. Now, that said, wanting to do that and getting that result are two very different things.

Show Notes

:36 “Pretty good growth numbers and a pretty energized bunch of partners”

1:41 Acumatica founded in 2007 means no FORTRAN code

3:15: Partners are not a side dish for Acumatica – there is no direct sales channel

Acumatica Co-Founder and Chairman Serguei Beloussov isn’t messing around. During his second day keynote (and also on this video) he declares a revenue goal of $1 billion in revenue and $5 billion in partner revenues in less than a decade.

So how will Acumatica get there? Serguei – a well-seasoned CEO and startup veteran – starts by giving Jon his view on why mobile and cloud trends matter. He then points to a midmarket ecosystem of VARs ready to sell cloud ERP that he believes have been neglected by the current players:

There are thousands of value added resellers…which have expertise in satisfying the customers of mid‑market with business applications. What happened is that, for some subjective and objective reasons, they are left unattended right now. The biggest vendors in this space are either moving their strategy to be more direct, like NetApp and Sage, or moving upmarket, like Microsoft, which forces them to focus on larger resellers.

Serguei sees the next piece of Acumatica’s advantage in terms of the lack of innovative products serving midmarket ERP customers. He believes they are stuck in a no-man’s land of sorts between QuickBooks and “big ERP” (Oracle/SAP) and are underserved from an innovation standpoint. Citing his conversations with midmarket CEOs unhappy with their current ERP systems, Serguei says:

It is mandatory for medium‑sized businesses to have ERP systems. It was enough to have accounting systems, in the past. But today, for them to stay competitive, they have to have a modern, complete ERP system. There is not as much choice, because they have limited budgets, limited time and a limited amount of expertise. They can’t afford to buy SAP and Oracle, and they can no longer use things like QuickBooks, because they are already sizable.

For most of the video, Serguei talks trends and does not explicitly plug Acumatica, so Jon gives him a chance to wrap the video with a “shameless plug.” Serguei complies.

One of the persistently murky areas of SAP’s cloud strategy is Business ByDesign. Even at the SAP Partner Summit, more ByDesign questions were raised than were answered.

To get a view from the field, Jon talked with Leonardo De Araujo of Beyond Technologies at the end of day one of the SAP Partner Summit in Miami. Leo’s firm has expertise in All-in-One implementations but they also have a ByDesign practice and run ByDesign internally.

Leo started by pointing out that even HANA was downplayed in the favor of the cloud emphasis:

I thought there would be a lot of talk about cloud, but it was even more than I expected. It was refreshing, because we’ve been talking HANA for so many years, and everything else is second priority. Now it was cloud, and actually HANA was a component of enabling, delivering something else in the cloud, but it was all about cloud. That was refreshing, but as I quickly mentioned to you before, this possibility of subscribing to All‑in‑One in the long term, is going to be a big game changer.

Jon and Leo then moved into a discussion of the suddenly crowded SAP SME cloud landscape with ByDesign (the multi-tenant product) being joined by hosted B1 and hosted All-in-One. Leo also gives his view on the future of ByDesign and tells Jon why he thinks it’s a good product that his customers are asking for.

Leo also talks about Beyond Technologies working on ByDesign add-ons, which leads into a surprising discussion about UI. Leo argues that “beautiful” is a far less important design criteria than “it works well”:

Again, when we talk about user‑experience, we just have to distinguish between looking good and being functional. [ByDesign] looks good. It looks fine. Some transactions could be a little bit more optimized with less steps. But then, even now with the SDK, we can fix that.

On the mobility front, Leo has long been a proponent of ByDesign’s mobility features – he explains that he is now submitting timesheets to ByDesign for his company through his iPhone. The guys wrap with some back-and-forth on cloud performance and call it a wrap.

Show Notes

:45 Beyond Technologies – an SAP service and channel partner which includes a ByD practice

:55 Surprising shift from cloud to HANA at the Partner Summit

2:13 Confusion about cloud definitions and products

3:31 Partners will need coaching to make the cloud transition ted people with experience in the SAP solutions. Now the customers out there could get lost. That’s something that you need to pay attention to.

ERP vendors with deep on-premise history and products have a different set of issues with cloud. During Dennis’ trip to Africa, he got a first hand view on these topics from Simon Griffiths of SYSPRO.

Simon tells Dennis about SYSPRO’s decision to provide a cloud deployment option for their customers. Considerations included regional autonomy, cost, user experience, and the extent of code rewrites. SYSPRO has currently opted for a hybrid cloud model, giving customers the choice to move to cloud or also back to on-premise.

Simon shares the thinking and field views behind those decisions:

We actually looked at it from a number of areas. One, obviously, was the technology side. When you’re an on‑premise vendor, how you’re going to put that technology into the cloud. The other thing was how you were going to price it. When you’re going into the cloud, your pricing model changes completely. The old ways of doing things no longer apply.

One hot button topic is code rewrites. Purists insist that products should be entirely rewritten for the cloud, but many on-premise vendors, including SYSPRO, are taking a different route. Simon’s take:

Certainly, we’re not going to rewrite all our code which we’ve been developing for the 20‑ or 30‑odd years. What we did realize, after a while, is that user interface needs to be more appropriate… We’ve used Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation. That basically allows us to deliver that thin‑client type of application. One of the problems that people don’t seem to realize, in an ERP, is it’s not just a whole bunch of fields. There’s a lot of complex stuff on that traditional thick client. Just to try and put that on a web page is very, very difficult. Our decision was to go thin client, but then that’s why we adopted Windows Communication Foundation.

But while SYSPRO decided against a massive code rewrite, they are focusing intensely on enhancing the user experience along with cloud delivery. The last part of the talk covers how SYSPRO is approaching user-experience, and why a “process-centric” approach matters.

Ernst & Young are definitely back in the SAP consulting game. After being one of the “big six” that initially drove the SAP R/3 market, Ernst & Young sold their SAP practice to Capgemini.

But as E & Y’s Geoff Vickery told Jon in Miami, they launched a new SAP consulting practice in 2009. Now they are reckoning with the cloud consulting model like most SAP partners.

Geoff credits two growth factors for Ernst & Young: strength of client relationships and outsourcing IT specialists. Geoff says that when clients tell him why they chose E & Y, it’s due to the ability to speak the language of business and how they could improve their customer’s ROI: ‘we have business conversations, not technical conversations.’

When it comes to cloud, Geoff says that customers are looking hard at cloud but opting for a hybrid model. Factors include:

What can be put in the cloud now?

What should be be moved to the cloud but deferred for now?

What should be kept on-premise?

How do you operate in that hybrid environment?

Needless to say, this kind of conversation also requires a different kind of consultant. It’s easy to say that consultants should be well-rounded, but what does that mean? Geoff believes it means mastering the new technology, but not for its own sake – you have to be able to apply the tech to business problems.

For Geoff, it comes down to industry and domain expertise, as well as the ability to apply tech to solve real business problems.

As Jon says, “Sounds like the kind of consultant we should have had all along, but didn’t know it.”

Show Notes

1:03: Ernest & Young doubled down on the SAP consulting market in 2009

1:25 The key to Ernst & Young’s consulting growth

3:47 Big key – talk to clients in business terms – don’t have a technology conversation

4:22 Cloud benefits go beyond speed of implementation

5:10 Most customers asking for a hybrid cloud model

5:52 Consultants now have deliver stronger value, not just configuration techniques

6:18 Being a good consultant is about using tech to solve customer problems

Disclosure: SAP paid for most of Jon’s travel and accommodations to the SAP Partner Summit